QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Expert testimony can be incredibly powerful to a jury and sometimes it is the main evidence establishing guilt in the highest stakes cases,” said Melissa O’Connell, an attorney with the Northern California Innocence Project. “If we don’t scrutinize the basis upon which expert opinions rely, even when the expert’s own community has scrutinized their work, we run the risk of convictions being based on unreliable and unsound evidence leading to wrongful convictions.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "In California, Bill Richards of Mojave was famously convicted of murdering his wife primarily based on the expert testimony of a bite-mark pattern analyst who confirmed that a bite mark on the victim’s hand matched Richards’ crooked teeth. The Innocence Project later demanded DNA testing of samples collected from the murder weapon and found they matched neither Richards nor his wife. "
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STORY: "California Senator takes on wrongful convictions and forensics in reform bill," by reporter Matthew Renda, published by The Courthouse News on January 22, 2021. (Thanks to Dr. Michael Bowers of CSIDDS: Forensic and Law in Focus for bringing this story to our attention at the link below. Dr. Bower's post runs under the heading: "Bill Richard's bite mark case (see Registry of Exonerations entry later on in this post for background on the Richard's case), HL) leads to California senator taking on wrongful convictions and forensics in reform bill." Dr. Bower's comment: "A “one tooth” bitemark “match” from an ABFO/AAFS (American Board of Forensic Odontology/American Academy of Forensic Sciences. HL) bitemarker led to Bill’s 26 years in jail and prison. A Texas upper court has just stayed a Jan 21 2021 execution of Blaine Milam based on a “3 tooth” bitemark ID from another ABFO/AAFS dentist. I participated in both appeals. “Bitemark Science” is unsafe for ANY purpose. The AAFS should repudiate this junk science methods and sanction its affiliated “forensic dental board” (www.abfo.org) for continuing to assert lies about its efficacy."https://csidds.com/2021/01/23/forensics-whostp45-bill-richards-bogus-abfo-bitemark-case-leads-to-california-senator-taking-on-wrongful-convictions-and-forensics-in-reform-bill/
SUB-HEADING: "A California lawmaker has introduced a bill to clarify standards for forensic science used during criminal trials, while making it easier for those wrongfully convicted to seek Justice."
GIST: "A California lawmaker introduced a bill Friday that seeks to change the legal standards regarding expert testimony and forensic evidence before and after trials to make it easier for the falsely accused to challenge wrongful convictions.
Senate Bill 243 by state Senator Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, is part of a larger slate of criminal justice reform bills that focus particularly on wrongful convictions. Wiener said inaccurate expert testimony and faulty forensics are the largest factors in the high rate of wrongful convictions, with approximately 200 people wrongly serving extended jail sentences for serious crimes like rape or murder in California since 1989.
“The End Wrongful Convictions Act gets us one step closer to ensuring no one is sent to prison for a crime they did not commit, and it will allow those wrongfully convicted to seek freedom,” the state senator said in a prepared statement Friday. “Expert testimony should be based on accurate scientific facts and logic, and we need to stop allowing unreliable expert witness testimony.”
The bill makes clear that outmoded scientific research and technology once common in courtroom proceedings can no longer be part of expert testimony, while experts who do not use peer-reviewed methodologies to arrive at their conclusions will not be admissible into court.
The National Academy of Sciences first highlighted the problem in a 2009 report that found the quality of forensic science varied widely by jurisdiction due to a variety of factors such as the quality of instruments or the competence of the people doing the investigating.
One of the most notable conclusions of the report is that fingerprint evidence, once the gold standard for forensic scientists, can be prone to confirmation bias in that police find what they expect or want to find in the results.
For instance, the FBI’s vaunted fingerprint unit matched prints found at the scene of the Madrid train station bombing in 2004 to a Portland, Oregon, attorney, but the prints were later confirmed to belong to an Algerian terrorist. The FBI agents at the time were investigating the attorney because he had recently converted to Islam.
In California, Bill Richards of Mojave was famously convicted of murdering his wife primarily based on the expert testimony of a bite-mark pattern analyst who confirmed that a bite mark on the victim’s hand matched Richards’ crooked teeth. The Innocence Project later demanded DNA testing of samples collected from the murder weapon and found they matched neither Richards nor his wife.
“Expert testimony can be incredibly powerful to a jury and sometimes it is the main evidence establishing guilt in the highest stakes cases,” said Melissa O’Connell, an attorney with the Northern California Innocence Project. “If we don’t scrutinize the basis upon which expert opinions rely, even when the expert’s own community has scrutinized their work, we run the risk of convictions being based on unreliable and unsound evidence leading to wrongful convictions.”
Wiener’s bill isn’t solely about admitting evidence and expert testimony during the pretrial process but also seeks to facilitate those wrongly convicted to challenge their cases based on faulty forensics.
“SB 243 will ensure that innocent people have an avenue to challenge bad convictions by looking at the faulty science used in their trials,” said Jasmin Harris, associate director of policy at California Innocence Project.
Wiener has been heavily involved in criminal justice reform. He also introduced Senate Bill 923, which clarifies the procedure police must use when collecting eyewitness testimony. Eyewitness misidentification is yet another factor in the wrongful conviction rate, he said."
The entire story can be read at:
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Read National Registry of Exonerations entry on William (Bill) Richards, by Maurice Possley, under the link below - and the heading 'other murder cases with false or misleading forensic evidence."
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "In 2001, the California Innocence Project at California Western School of Law began re-investigating the case. In 2007, a state petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed on behalf of Richards. The petition claimed that tests on the cinder block used to smash Pamela’s skull identified a male DNA that was not Richards’. DNA testing on hair from under Pamela’s fingernails also excluded Richards. Moreover, the autopsy photograph depicting the alleged bitemark was examined and was determined to be distorted. Once the distortion was corrected, defense bitemark experts concluded that Richards was not responsible for the bitemark, according to affidavits from the experts. And finally, Dr. Sperber recanted his trial testimony that only 1 or 2 percent of the population had Richards’ dental irregularity. “These percentages were based on my own experience and were not scientifically accurate,” he said in an affidavit for the petition. He also retracted the central conclusion of his trial testimony: “With the benefits of all of the photographs (of the crime scene and Pamela’s injuries) and with my added experience, I would not now testify as I did in 1997, and I cannot now say with certainty that the injury on the victim’s hand is a human bitemark injury.”
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THE ENTRY: "Shortly before midnight on August 10, 1993, 43-year-old William Richards came home from work and discovered the body of his 40-year-old wife, Pamela. She had been severely beaten, apparently with fist-sized rocks, a cinder block, and a stepping stone, on the property where they lived in the Mojave Desert in California.
Richards became a suspect immediately because the couple had been having financial and marital difficulties. They both had sexual relationships outside the marriage and a month earlier, Richards had drawn up a document proposing a division of their property.
An autopsy showed that Pamela had been strangled and her skull had been smashed. Blood was found inside the couple’s camper as well as near a generator outside. Police confiscated Richards’ clothing, which bore only three tiny dots of blood spatter and what appeared to be blood transferred when Richards cradled his wife’s head after he found her body.
Nearly a month later, Richards was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
He went to trial four times in San Bernardino County Superior Court before he was convicted. The first trial resulted in mistrial when the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The second trial ended in a mistrial during jury selection. The third trial resulted in a mistrial when the jury again was unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
Ten days before the fourth trial began in August 1997, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office asked Dr. Norman Sperber, a dentist and forensic odontologist, to examine a photograph taken during Pamela’s autopsy that showed a crescent-shaped lesion on Pamela’s right hand.
At the trial, Dr. Sperber told the jury that based on his more than 40 years of examining bitemarks, he could say that out of 100 people, only “one or two or less” would have the same “unique feature” in their lower teeth that he found in Richards’ teeth. Dr. Sperber testified that Richards had made the bitemark on Pamela’s hand.
The prosecution also presented evidence that blue cotton fibers found in a crack of one of Pamela’s fingernails were similar in composition to fibers in the shirt Richards was wearing. The analyst who performed the comparison admitted, however, that such cotton fibers were among the most common fibers in the world.
The defense presented evidence showing that Richards clocked out of work at 11:03 p.m. on the night Pamela’s body was found. Even driving 75 miles an hour, a defense investigator testified, he did not arrive at the Richards property until 11:47 p.m.—a distance of 44.8 miles from where Richards worked. Evidence showed that Richards answered a telephone call at the property at 11:55 p.m. and told the caller that he had just found his wife’s body. Richards called 911 at 11:58 p.m. The defense argued that Richards could not have committed the crime during such a brief interval of time.
Pamela’s brother said he spoke with Pamela by telephone around 7 or 7:30 p.m. and she seemed normal, although she said she and Richards had been arguing earlier. Another witness testified that he called the residence just before 10 p.m. and no one answered.
Dr. Gregory Golden, a dentist and chief odontologist for San Bernardino County, testified that the bitemark evidence was of no value because the bitemark was generic in nature and the photograph was of low quality. Dr. Golden conceded on cross-examination, however, that the unique feature of Richards’ lower teeth could only be found in a small number of people.
Dean Gialamas, a senior criminalist with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, examined the bloodstains on Richards’ clothes and performed numerous experiments with concrete blocks and bloodied hair. He concluded, “Given the lack of spatter on (Richards’) clothing, no, I don’t think this clothing is consistent with this individual being the perpetrator.”
On July 8, 1997, Richards was convicted of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
His conviction was upheld on appeal in 2000.
In 2001, the California Innocence Project at California Western School of Law began re-investigating the case. In 2007, a state petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed on behalf of Richards. The petition claimed that tests on the cinder block used to smash Pamela’s skull identified a male DNA that was not Richards’. DNA testing on hair from under Pamela’s fingernails also excluded Richards.
Moreover, the autopsy photograph depicting the alleged bitemark was examined and was determined to be distorted. Once the distortion was corrected, defense bitemark experts concluded that Richards was not responsible for the bitemark, according to affidavits from the experts.
And finally, Dr. Sperber recanted his trial testimony that only 1 or 2 percent of the population had Richards’ dental irregularity. “These percentages were based on my own experience and were not scientifically accurate,” he said in an affidavit for the petition. He also retracted the central conclusion of his trial testimony: “With the benefits of all of the photographs (of the crime scene and Pamela’s injuries) and with my added experience, I would not now testify as I did in 1997, and I cannot now say with certainty that the injury on the victim’s hand is a human bitemark injury.”
At the conclusion of an evidentiary hearing in 2009, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Brian McCarville vacated Richards’ conviction saying the evidence pointed “unerringly” to innocence.
The prosecution appealed the ruling and in 2012 the California Supreme Court, by a 4-to-3 vote, reversed the trial court’s ruling because Dr. Sperber’s recantation did not fit the state’s legal definition of “false evidence” that would allow Richards to mount a successful post-conviction challenge to his conviction.
In response, the California Legislature, in a 2014 act called the Bill Richards Bill, amended the state criminal code to state the “false evidence” should also “include opinions of experts that have either been repudiated by the expert who originally provided the opinion at a hearing or trial or that have been undermined by later scientific research or technological advances.”
A new state petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed on behalf of Richards and in May 2016, the California Supreme Court granted the writ and vacated Richards’s conviction.
The court agreed that Sperber’s testimony was false, that the bitemark evidence was critical to the conviction, and there was a reasonable probability that without that evidence Richards would not have been convicted.
Richards was released from prison on June 21, 2016 and on June 28, 2016, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office dismissed the charge.
In March 2017, Richards filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against San Bernardino County and Sperber. In 2018, he filed a request for $1,165,780 in state compensation. In September 2019, the federal lawsuit was dismissed."
